LEVY: Docs set to expose health-care lies

Concerned Ontario Doctors president Kulvinder Gill says it’s not just that the Liberals stole their campaign hashtag “#Carenotcuts” by transforming it into “#Careorcuts” to fight PC leader Doug Ford.

But as she told me Monday, they’ve “unilaterally stolen” more than $4 billion from front-line health care over the past three years.

Gill said it’s her group’s mission to expose the Liberal government’s health-care lies in the days leading up to the June 7 election.

That will start with their press conference at Queen’s Park Tuesday, which will give a report card on the Liberals’ health-care track record compared to the promises Premier Kathleen Wynne made in 2014.

“It’s going to be the truth … not these fabricated headlines Wynne’s government is putting out,” she said

In Ontario, 29,000 doctors have entered their fifth year without a contract.

“Wynne, the former health minister (Eric Hoskins) and even the current health minister have been great at manipulating facts and trying to convince the public that doctors and health-care providers are the enemy,” she said. “She wants people to think health care is not underfunded but that health-care workers are just not doing their jobs properly.”

She said patients need to be informed that nothing Wynne has given to buy votes (such as in “free” drugs) is “free” and most of the taxes we are paying towards health care are going to support a wasteful health care bureaucracy in the form of the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs).

“The health-care system is a mess,” she said, predicting if the Liberals are re-elected they will build up even more of a bloated bureaucracy. “What’s happening is health care is being rationed.”

She said surgeons are leaving the province because instead of properly funding doctors and nurses needed to perform surgeries, the “lights are being turned off” in hospital operating rooms.

Gill said the Liberals are also playing a “charade” where shiny new hospitals are being built but the people needed to provide the care in those hospitals are not being properly funded.

She said it’s hypocritical of the Wynne Liberals to claim “they care about patients” and they have a commitment to health care when they are “still cutting millions of dollars from patient care.”

Gill said based on the government’s track record, she has no faith that if elected, the Wynne government will implement any of the funding increases announced in last week’s budget.